Home > Work > Eight Blonde Dolls (Seth Halliday, #3)
1 " Jennifer and Mark were a reminder that they weren’t all a lost cause. It was just a shame they were in such a minority group. Maybe they could start a movement: Decent People’s Lives Matter. It could be all inclusive, even accept cops in their charter. Probably wouldn’t get any traction with the PC crowd, though. Not the “right” kind of people, or the “right” kind of cause. "
― Bobby Underwood , Eight Blonde Dolls (Seth Halliday, #3)
2 " All families were like that, with their private damage they kept among themselves, ghosts they lived with that only other family members knew about. "
3 " I took the photos with me and heard Lucija making the call. As I closed the door behind me, I caught the scent of death from the patio, carried on the breeze moving the branches of the olive trees. "
4 " It isn’t easy to look inconspicuous doing a stakeout in an Aston Martin Vanquish, but it’s easier in Monaco and Monte Carlo than just about anywhere else, and so far, no one seemed to give me a second thought. "
5 " Halfway back to the Keys on Seven Mile Bridge, as day lost its eternal struggle against night, someone in Miami called in to the radio station I was listening to, and requested Gloria Estefan’s Si Voy a Perderte. I turned it up and listened to the sad strains of Estefan’s emotional pleading while I drove across the water in darkness. I could almost have sworn under oath that the caller’s voice was that of Anna Marquez… "
6 " I had to drive through a very poor and largely Hispanic section of Miami to get to the apartment complex where Casey Martin had died. There were a lot of beautiful women on the sidewalks and at the outdoor cafés, a lot of tough guys and a lot of guys who weren’t tough but trying to look like they were. The streets were alive with what criminally passed for music nowadays, and there were smells of cooking in the air that suggested savory tastes. Small, hole-in-the-wall shops marked one end, and some more upscale stores the other. The dividing line between the two was discernible not just by the stores, but the women.The women and even younger girls at the lower income end seemed softer, friendlier, quicker with a genuine smile. The ones walking into the trendy places were just as pretty, more expensively dressed, but more apt to express scorn than produce a spontaneous smile. The upscale women appeared to be from a different planet. For them, everything was sexist, everything a slight. They were eternal victims, even though the entire world was in their favor. The women at the poor end fell in love, watched out for their men, while the more affluent were stand-offish and demanding, making certain any man “lucky” enough to be with them lived in the right zip code, had the right amount of bling to give them, and above all, had been properly neutered. The balls of their boyfriends and husbands — sometimes they had both — were always in their handbag, somewhere between the trendy lip liner and eye shadow. A kiss from one of the poor girls was a sweet gift, filled with passion and tenderness, even if it could only last a night. A kiss from an uptown girl meant you’d checked off all her right boxes, and she needed to fulfill her duty. Girls without money were from Venus, girls with money were from Mars. "
7 " No one was more curious and excited about other cultures and peoples than Caroline. She sometimes still remembered facts about cultures, ancient secrets and rituals, sites of ruins that excited her when she talked about them. But her knowledge was partial where it had once been whole, her frequency of recall erratic and often fuzzy, like a station she couldn’t quite get tuned in on the dial so that it was clear.The drugs that had been given her on the night she was gang-raped in Cozumel had scrambled her memories permanently, and sent her knowledge into dark scattered corners where she could no longer access them at will. Most of the time, she couldn’t access them at all. When she did remember, she wrote it down on little notes she kept in her pockets. She had an I-Phone now, and sometimes she would transfer some of the notes to there, and to an I-Pad we kept around Sweet Caroline for that purpose. But Caroline still kept her paper notes, not trusting technology any more than I did. She took no chances, except the chance she’d taken on me, trusting me, letting me love her. From the outside, it might have appeared as though she needed me more than I needed her, but only to those who didn’t know I’d crossed a moral line from which I might never have returned had it not been for the strength and spirit of Caroline. "
8 " Doral used to be swampland, but now Carnival Cruise Lines and one of the major Miami papers makes it their home. Everyone who knows Florida well enough calls it Doralzula because so many Venezuelans live there. Rich Venezuelans, the beneficiaries of the old “re-distribute the wealth” scam of socialism, which fails repeatedly and consistently — though this fact is rarely ever mentioned in the media — around the globe. Once they had theirs, of course, they were off to the land of plenty, leaving the masses to wallow in poverty, under corrupt iron rule, while they golfed and ate at fine restaurants and bought exotic cars and slept with beautiful women who could be bought with luxury. Perhaps there was love sometimes, too, but I was always skeptical of any woman under forty wearing designer clothes.The far left loves countries like Cuba, and Venezuela, never taking note of the conditions, the poverty, or the people trying to get out and have a better life; most of whom will never make it to those golden shores of Florida. They are the first to cry over the oppressed, the victimized, the impoverished, as though they are their champion. Unless, of course, those unfortunate folks live in a country in line with their hard-left-leaning ideology, then they are willing to ignore their plight completely. There is no hypocrisy so bald as that of the liberal do-gooder. Talk to a real Venezuelan, or better yet, a Cuban refugee who’d made it to Miami, and ask them how it is there. After you do you will roll your eyes at the next liberal trying to convince you the time has come to embrace these countries. "
